Sweet, Bitter
by themicemen
Summary: Nochnoi Dozor/Night Watch It started with a cup of sugar and ended with 'good night.' There were no tears and no heart break, just a closed door and a cup of bitterness. Anton/Kostya. Written for Yuletide Treasure 2007.


Written for rubakhin in the Yuletide Treasure challenge of 2007. I'd wanted to try out themes of breath play in this but got distracted by other things so what you see is only a mere shadow of what I had planned. The disjointed feel is intentional.

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They had been neighbours for a whole of twenty minutes before Kostya was knocking on Anton's door, asking with those sweet, dark eyes of his whether or not Anton had a cup of sugar and if he could, as his new neighbour - very happy to make his acquaintance - partake of it, much obliged comrade. Coincidentally, Anton did not have any sugar but it seemed such a waste to close the door on that too lovely face. In retrospect, Kostya did not think that it would seem likely for Anton to have ever owned sugar enough to lend to a neighbour or even indulge in such friendly gestures.

Ironic of it, really, to start with something sweet.

Anton was a shy one and Kostya had therefore presumed that men were not his usual repast. He blushed easily and would dip his head and physically shrink into himself until his presence was almost undetectable. Kostya found it quite adorable and took every opportunity to tease and bait him with gestures and nuance that were riddled with innuendo, relying on the belief that Anton was not so naïve as to miss the subtext.

The first dose of bitterness started with a phone call - as they always do - and ended with a black eye, the hallways of the apartment building reverberating with the sound of angry screaming.

Kostya noted with great chagrin that after the fight Anton took to wearing those insufferable sunglasses. The light was always too bright and the nights were too short. Anton did not bother to draw the curtains anymore and when the window pane shattered from a stray football, kicked by the errant children in the yard below, he gladly took it as an excuse to cover the offending light-source with duct tape. Slowly, the walls followed down the same path - streaked with grime and rain from the leak in the ceiling - and dents appeared that went unexplained. Anton himself remained much the same, although sometimes Kostya thought he caught a glimpse of mad rage behind the reflective glasses.

Everyone knew what the City Light Company was a front for. Kostya knew, his father knew, hell, even the human employees at the butcher knew that there was something peculiar going on there - or at least their jokes hit the target close enough.

"Hiding in plain view again," said Kostya's father when Zavulon paid them a visit one Christmas.

"In broad daylight," said Zavulon, and that was the end of that.

Everyone knew, it seemed, except Anton himself. Kostya thought to comment when it was time to do the taxes, but decided that it was to be none of his business what Anton amused himself with in the daytime.

The second dose of bitterness came in the form of a job.

Kostya's father never spoke much of Anton. Kostya had thought that it was because he did not have much to do with the young man. So when Anton came around to the butcher for some spare blood and Kostya learned that he was a Light One, every out-of-place action of his that had ever bothered Kostya clicked and fell into place in a manner that made more sense. It was a stroke of luck that Anton did not return home that night or Kostya would have given him a good piece of his mind. After that night's fight with Andrey, however, Kostya caught a change in the air between himself and Anton. Something had gone wrong, twisted in upon itself and cracked whatever it was that had been going on.

Still, Kostya was proud enough to refrain from asking about the stuffed owl.

The tender kisses placed shyly upon his skin were gone. So were the blushes and the petting and the murmurs of pleasure in his ear. Instead, the memory of those sweet, bygone days was slowly being erased by harsh cries and the stuttering of precious breath.

One day, Anton returned home drunk on blood and Kostya fixed him with a stare.

"You're not really supposed to be drinking that," he said, brazenly.

In the blink of an eye he was up against the wall fighting for breath against the grip across his throat. This had become Anton's favourite game - depriving him of his breath, pushing to see how far he could go before he went too far.

"And yourself, tovarisch?" The grip tightened.

"I hear that pig's blood's a weak substitute." With his head spinning and his thoughts slowly losing focus, Kostya's world revolved around Anton's growling voice and the intoxicating smell of blood on his breath.

"Don't you wish you had a little of the real thing?" Anton whispered in his ear, leaning his neck against Kostya's.

"When the warmth isn't the kind that's kept in a thermos, but is freshly pumped from the heart?" Senses heightened in what his body told his mind was a near death experience, Kostya felt each pump of Anton's heart and heard the gushing of blood in his arteries. His teeth had already changed to feed before Anton let him fall, boneless, to the floor and then he was too weak to sate his desire.

"Go back to your flat, Kostya. I don't want you to sleep here anymore."

That was the third dose. It was only a cup of sugar and three doses of bitterness were more than enough to make the taste unbearable.

The next morning Anton seemed unexpectedly sober. When he knocked sheepishly on Kostya's door to ask for some clothes, Kostya had thought to take this moment to have a talk with him. When he went around to Anton's with his mother's things, however, it happened that having a semi-naked woman in the flat made any moment seem inappropriate. The owl, as it turned out, was the woman - who would have guessed?

In the following days, Kostya noticed that he had started to read about pain and suffering. He could not think back to when it all started but now that it had, he wondered - briefly - why. There were beatings and violence in the newspapers. There was heartbreak and pain in novels. There was failure and disappointment within himself.

_Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself._

It was strangely appropriate.

One night Anton stumbled up the stairs with the marks of Zavulon's chain around his neck. Kostya, peeping out from a crack in his door, said nothing.

"I couldn't take it off," Anton yelled at Kostya's door.

It was time, Kostya decided, to close things once and for all.

"Good night, tovarisch."

It had ended up being a bitter cup indeed.


End file.
